BISA BUTLER (1973 - )

La Quinceañera.

Quilted and appliquéd dyed cotton fabrics with lace collage, 2007. 844x641 mm; 33x25 inches. Signed in thread, lower right.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection, New Jersey (2007).

Born in Orange, NJ, Butler graduated Cum Laude from Howard University with a BFA degree. During her education at Howard, she refined her natural talents under the tutelage of lecturers such as Loïs Mailou Jones, Elizabeth Catlett, Jeff Donaldson, and Ernie Barnes. Butler then went on to earn an MFA from Montclair State University in 2005. Butler was a high school art teacher for ten years in the Newark Public Schools and three years at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey. While obtaining her MFA, Butler took a Fiber Arts class where she had an artistic epiphany relating to how she expresses her art. "As a child, I was always watching my mother and grandmother sew, and they taught me. After that class, I made a portrait quilt for my grandmother on her deathbed, and I have been making art quilts ever since."

Butler's work was recently the focus of a solo exhibition Bisa Butler: Portraits at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second stop of a traveling exhibit that began at the Katonah Museum of Art, 2020 - 2021. The Toledo Museum of Art recently exhibited Butler's work in a group show. Butler's artwork has recently been acquired by many private and public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Nelson-Atkins Museum, The Kemper Museum of Art, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, The Toledo Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Pérez Museum of Art, Miami.

The artist's original sketch for the quilt is included in the lot.